On the Dawn Wall, Climbing and Tweeting

MADISON, N.H. — A LITTLE before noon on Nov. 18, 1970, a blood-flecked hand pawed the top of the southeast face of El Capitan, the massive, 3,000-foot vertical wall in Yosemite National Park known to climbers as the Dawn Wall. A bearded, wild-eyed man eventually pulled himself up and stumbled back into the realm of horizontal existence after 26 nights lashed to the cliff. Approximately 70 reporters and well-wishers rushed forward to greet him. A dozen TV cameras whirred.

In California’s beatnik climbing circles, Warren Harding, who completed the first ascent of Yosemite’s grandest wall that day with his partner, Dean Caldwell, stood out for his penchant for fast sports cars and beautiful women and for his voracious consumption of red wine. When asked why he climbed, he responded, succinctly: “Because we are insane.”

Some years later, Mr. Harding, retired from serious climbing, attended a party in Estes Park, Colo., at the home of Mike Caldwell (no relation to Dean Caldwell), a climber and guide. Mike introduced Mr. Harding to his 5-year-old son, a towhead named Tommy.

This week, it is his bloodied hands that are pawing relentlessly toward the summit of the Dawn Wall. Tommy Caldwell, 36, is poised with a partner, Kevin Jorgeson, 30, to make history by becoming the first to free climb the same face Mr. Harding and Mr. Caldwell conquered.

The distinction is that in free climbing, climbers use only their hands, feet, arms and legs to make upward progress — and not the bolts, pitons and other contrivances Mr. Harding and his partner used, and for which they were criticized. In free climbing, ropes and other equipment are used only to stop a fall.

Many climbers consider the Caldwell-Jorgeson effort, begun on Dec. 27, to be perhaps the most difficult free climb ever attempted.

The anticipation and spectacle surrounding it — an adventure that, thanks to cellphones, social media and the Internet, has been shared by millions of people — surpass anything imaginable in Mr. Harding’s day. And like Mr. Harding’s ascent, this one has not come without some skepticism and bewilderment about all the fuss.

“Spending two to three weeks on the route, surrounded by camera crews, fixed lines, and other media accoutrements; getting goodies brought up to you by friends... Doesn’t something about all that seem a little out of place in the middle of El Capitan?” Chris Kalman, a climber, asked this week on his blog, Fringe’s Folly. “Where, I repeat, is the adventure?” But Mr. Kalman acknowledged in a postscript that he was rooting for them: “"I’ve got my fingers crossed.”

Although some 13 other full-length routes on El Cap have been free climbed, none of those come close to the sustained level of difficulty the Dawn Wall presents. It took Tommy Caldwell, who has free climbed 11 of those other routes, more than anyone else, seven years to piece together a way up the wall. He methodically explored the sheer face by rappelling down from the top of El Capitan on reconnaissance missions, searching for the tiniest wrinkles in the smooth rock to pull himself upward. He fell hundreds of times while attempting the route’s numerous pitches (a pitch is a segment of climbing less than the length of a rope), though he was caught each time by his rope.

The resulting route is a masterpiece. The hardest section, Pitches 14 and 15, involved traversing horizontally across the blankest portion of the wall for more than 300 feet. This required the power and coordination of an Olympic gymnast and the footwork of a ballerina. The potato-chip-thin rock flakes to which Mr. Caldwell clung on this passage left deep lacerations on his fingertips. (As of midday Thursday, Mr. Jorgeson had not completed Pitch 15.)

Their climb is in contrast to the ascent by Mr. Harding and his partner. They tenaciously built a ladder up the cliff out of pitons, bolts and nylon slings. Back then, over campfires and in the pages of climbing journals, some of Mr. Harding’s more high-minded peers grumbled that he played up his climbs for media attention and employed a heavy-handed style of ascent, drilling too many holes into the rock for expansion bolts to aid his climb.

With enough bolts and patience, critics complained, any piece of rock could be climbed. “I felt like screaming,” one climber, T. M. Herbert, wrote at the time in The American Alpine Journal. They bolted the thing, he added, “and they sold it to millions on television!”

Technology and the media may bring viewers closer than ever before to these intense endeavors, but in Mr. Harding’s day, they could have the curious effect of dehumanizing both the personalities and the experience. Only Mr. Harding’s real friends knew, for instance, that in truth he remained devoted to but one woman — his mother. When asked how it felt to see her 46-year-old son high up on the Dawn Wall, making history, she replied, “This is the longest Warren’s ever been away from home.”

Mr. Harding died in 2002 at age 77. Now Mike Caldwell checks in regularly with his son for updates by cellphone. Tommy also FaceTimes daily with his wife and young son, Fitz, from the wall.

This is a pleasant change from the tales of death and disaster that most often thrust climbing into the news. The climbing community will sort out for itself what techniques are fair, and what’s baloney. The beauty of the endeavor, as Mr. Harding surely would understand, is that ultimately each and every climber gets to define his or her own meaning of adventure.

Freddie Wilkinson is a professional climber and guide, and the author of “One Mountain Thousand Summits: The Untold Story of Tragedy and True Heroism on K2.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: On the Dawn Wall, Climbing and Tweeting. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe